Author
Topic: The "ads" (Read 76420 times)

Hey all, I just wanted to mention about the ads which are now on the forum. I realize that people might not love that these are on the site, but I am simply experimenting with them right now. A few quick notes on this:

I tried to put them in places which aren't too obnoxious.

The site costs over $5k per year to maintain, so even if I can get a small amount back it would be a big help.

I am putting the money back into the site. I am in the process of moving the site onto a new dedicated server. Right now the site runs on a Pentium 4, 2.8GHz. The new server will be a Core 2 Duo 1.86GHz with dual processors. Once installed the site should be significantly faster!

Also look few a new design for both the main page and the forum within the next 60 days.

So I hope you all understand why I can experimenting with ads on the site. I don't mind spending the money to keep the site up and running, but I also want to continue to upgrade and improve the site and this might just be a necessary evil in order to do this. Thanks for understanding.

Yes, the site runs on a dedicated server. Which means that I have an ENTIRE server running (normally a server will host something like 50-200 individual sites at once) just this site and nothing but this site. It was necessary for the amount of traffic the site was getting.

The forums alone get well over a million page views A MONTH (some months it has been double or triple this), which is a lot of traffic (and A LOT of database calls). So the only way I can keep this site up and running is to have it on a dedicated server which can handle a large amount of traffic quickly. Hence, the expense.

Have you thought of getting someone in to tinker with the forums to minimise database load?

I hadn't noticed ads because I have adblock. I might consider whitelisting this site for the moment if the ads don't annoy me because I understand how difficult it is to host a site without anything supporting it.

EDIT: I whitelisted @@|http://*gamingsteve.com/* and I couldn't see any ads. Then I disabled adblock and I still couldn't see them.

Person21 - As enjoyed by Veraal.A wise Surface to Air Missile once said about marrying 9 year olds in Saudi Arabia "Its pretty hard to tell if a 9 year old is going to be hot when she grows up, kids change a lot, usually, seems like a bad system. That cute little nine year old you married could end being a fat, zitty teenager."